A quiet notice V2Melody closes at midnight on , Spanish time.

Closes

A note from Richard

V2Melody will close at midnight on 20 January 2028

This site has been a retirement project in musical poetry: poems chosen with care and set to music, offered freely for as long as it felt right to keep the garden open.

The work no longer holds the place it once did in my life. I have gone as far with it as I wish to go. Like a sand mandala, it was made to be completed and then released. I am not attached to its permanence, and I do not believe any of it needs to last beyond the time it was given. The poems were already here before I arrived and began to experiment with them. They will still be here when these musical experiments, and indeed myself, have been swept away, like the sand of a mandala. Nothing has been lost.

I want a simpler end to my life, days of simple love and enjoyment with my wonderful wife of 20 years. The work of maintaining a server, the monitoring, and the residual obligations that come with keeping a site alive no longer fit that life.

From 4 November 2026 I will not be adding new poems or musical poems to the site.

Until midnight on 20 January 2028, Spanish time, everything remains available exactly as it is. That is when my VPS server contract comes to an end, and it will not be renewed. After that, the server will be switched off and the site will disappear.

The Mandala Is Finished explains this more fully.

Thank you to anyone who found a poem, a track, or a quiet moment here.

The pleasure was in the making.

Richard



Compare Poets

Pick two poets who seem to have nothing to do with each other — a Gothic American and a pastoral Englishman, say — and see where the catalogue actually joins them: overlapping years, shared ground, distinctive themes, and the poems that secretly rhyme.

Poet A

Leigh Hunt Leigh Hunt

Poet B

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Compare two related contemporaries

A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.

Kindred spirits
Their work already rhymes in the catalogue. The rest of this page is the story around that rhyme.
Biography 69% Poems 90% Blended 78%
Swap sides Another related pair
Leigh Hunt

Leigh Hunt

19 October 1784 – 28 August 1859 (~75)
9 live poems · English

James Henry Leigh Hunt, known throughout his literary life as Leigh Hunt, was born on 19 October 1784 at Southgate, then a village north of London, and died at Putney on 28 August 1859. He was a poet, essayist, journalist, editor, critic, translator, dramatist, and indefatigable friend to writers whose fame would eventually eclipse his own. To describe him merely as a minor Romantic poet is to miss the range of his a…

“He brings poetry to our breakfast-table, and strikes light out of the pebble at our feet.”

Neighbourhood: Love Poets, Nature Poets, Political Poets, Romantic Poets
Emotional landscape: Tenderness, Joy, Wonder
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

29 August 1809 – 7 October 1894 (~85)
16 live poems · English

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., born 29 August 1809 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and dead 7 October 1894 in Boston, was one of the most recognizably versatile figures in nineteenth-century American culture: physician, medical reformer, anatomist, professor, poet, novelist, essayist, conversational satirist, and public intellectual. He was often called the “Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table,” after his most celebrated prose…

“One must do his best to keep the natural laws on his side, and then take what comes to him.”

Neighbourhood: American Poets, Death & Mortality, Light Verse Poets, Social Justice Poets, Victorian Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Tenderness, Wonder

In time

Leigh Hunt
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
1784 1894
They overlapped for 51 years (1809–1859). When Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. was born, Leigh Hunt was about 25. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. was about 50 when Leigh Hunt died.

On the map

About 5,260 km separate Southgate, London, England from Boston, Massachusetts, USA. Different countries, different weather — unless a poem carries one landscape into the other.

Themes they return to

Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.

Shared

From the biographies

social

Leigh Hunt: southgate, putney, john keats, percy bysshe shelley, the examiner, the feast of the poets, the story of rimini, cockney school of poetry. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.: cambridge, massachusetts, boston, old ironsides, the contagiousness of puerperal fever, the autocrat of the breakfast-table, amelia lee jackson, harvard college, hasty pudding club.

Poems that secretly rhyme

The closest poem-to-poem matches in critique space — the sort of kinship a listener hears before the catalogue admits it.

Sprightly Old Age
Leigh Hunt
79% youth, life
Compare
The Old Man Dreams
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Cupid Swallowed!
Leigh Hunt
78% love
Compare
Strange! that one lightly whispered tone
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Abou Ben Adhem
Leigh Hunt
78% love, spiritual
Compare
Strange! that one lightly whispered tone
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Cupid Swallowed!
Leigh Hunt
77% love
Compare
Tartarus
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Love and Age
Leigh Hunt
77% love
Compare
Strange! that one lightly whispered tone
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
Abou Ben Adhem
Leigh Hunt
76% love, divine
Compare
Tartarus
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

The world around them

While their lives overlapped

Notable events from the years they were both alive.

Emotional landscapes

Leigh Hunt: Tenderness, Joy, Wonder. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.: Longing, Tenderness, Wonder.

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